West Hollywood's 27 Top-Priority Homeless Cases Still Lack Permanent Homes

Residents can question city staff about the plan and meet city-funded service providers at Plummer Park on Saturday, Nov. 14.

West Hollywood picked 27 of its most visible, highest-need unhoused people and started working their cases one by one. None of them has moved into permanent housing yet.

Residents get to ask about it on Saturday, Nov. 14, when city staff host a Community Conversation on Homelessness at Plummer Park's Fiesta Hall, WEHO Times reported Wednesday. Staff plan to explain the city's Coordinated Response Framework, report how it's going and what comes next, and take questions, including how neighbors can help connect someone with services.

The framework is the city's effort to get outreach teams, health providers and Los Angeles County partners working the same cases together. When staff started digging into those cases in August, providers had already known the median person on the list for about seven years, WEHOonline reported from the City Council's Oct. 5 meeting. Eighteen were assessed as having the highest level of need.

And yet 22 of the 27 had no active housing referral. Twenty-one had either no needs assessment or a stale one.

That's shifting. Every one of the 27 has since been handed to a lead agency, and 24 now have a mapped route toward a home, according to WEHOonline. Seven are in interim housing, two of them at the city's Holloway Interim Housing Program.

The wider picture is moving too. West Hollywood's latest homeless count tallied 36 people living unsheltered, less than half the 79 counted a year earlier.

Mayor John Heilman pinned the delays on the county. The city spends about $6 million a year on homelessness, WEHOonline reported, but staff described county mental health referrals that get closed when workers can't find someone the city's own outreach teams see all the time. Heilman reminded the council that the city pays for the mental health team, the shelter and the outreach workers, then asked, WEHOonline reported, "Where's the partnership here?"

Some of the snags are tiny. County workers sometimes phone from blocked numbers, staff said, so a missed call can leave nobody to ring back.

Councilmembers also said residents walk past the same unhoused neighbor at one spot day after day, never knowing whether an outreach worker has stopped by 10 times or a bed has been offered. The Nov. 14 session is where staff will lay out that progress in public.

Free food is handed out from 9:30 a.m. until it's gone, and the city suggests bringing a reusable shopping bag. The open house follows at 10 a.m., with city-funded providers covering everything from childcare and legal aid to substance-use recovery and job training. The homelessness conversation begins at 10:30. It's free, at 7377 Santa Monica Blvd., and open to anyone who lives, works or goes to school in West Hollywood, plus people experiencing homelessness. The city encourages registering at go.weho.org/providersopenhouse.

At the Oct. 5 meeting, Councilmember Chelsea Byers pushed back on calling it a refusal when someone turns down a bed. The bed might be miles away, she noted, or taking it might mean leaving behind a partner or chosen family. "To me, that's not a refusal of service," Byers said, WEHOonline reported. "It's actually an engagement that's becoming more specific and clear."

Source: wehotimes.com, retrieved October 28, 2026. Other sources: wehoonline.com.